How Sloth Began!

Joined: May 14, 2004
Posts: 468
Location: Newport Beach, CA
PostPosted: Feb 09, 2005 - 02:48 PM Post subject:
Yeah, OK.
While I was an undergrad in California another guy at the school, Miikka
something-or-other, was running a diku called Eltanin. I played this for about
6 months with a friend back in Texas (we had gone to high school together),
and then while poking around on the internet I found the diku gamma 0.0 source
was available. So, we decided we'd rather run a mud than play one. Neither one
of us knew how to program very well, and only a little unix, and Sloth is where we
learned.
I was stuck in Colonial Williamsburg over Christmas vacation with nothing much to
do, and I wrote a whole bunch of areas. I think they were: BH, gnolls, BH sewer,
jungle, garden, and sahaguin (which actually should be spelled "sahuagin"
but I didn't know that then). While I was doing that Geddy coded the multiclass
system and some other changes from stock, I don't remember what else now.
Coding was fun, the comments were few and Danish. At one spot there was the
comment "HVORFOR DET!?!", it was many years before I figured out what that
meant.
Sloth took off pretty quickly because we had original areas, and because
there weren't so many muds back then (this was early 1991, I think); I think
within a year we had something like 30 players on regularly. A lot of these
were people from our two schools.
We ran it until maybe 1995 when I was in grad school in Houston and Geddy
was still in Austin. We had done piles of coding on it over the four years and
also we and others had generated many areas. The player base was getting
younger as more high-school kids got internet access. Also whinier. At some
point we tweaked the backstab damage modifiers a bit, it set off an unbelievable
storm of bitching on the board at the West Gate (there wasn't a web site back then),
and we said "screw this" and shut the mud down.
And that is Sloth I's history. There's a fictionalized version in the backstory
accessible through this web page.
Vom ( Aka Kjartan )